In 2015 and 2016 our primary focus was on making the necessary structural changes and creating a cost base that was in line with the company’s revenue. From the end of 2016 and through 2017, we were able to shift our focus to achieving growth from our existing services portfolio and to developing new growth areas.

We have summarised our business plan into three focus areas: customer centricity, collaboration, and culture. These areas are closely interrelated, and it is crucial for future value creation that we become stronger in all three.

In order to create digital advantage for our customers, we need to understand the challenges facing them over the long term as well as the short term. We need to have insight into our customers’ markets and to understand the drivers affecting demand from our customers’ customers. We know and have confirmed through experience that collaboration is key to achieving this, both in our relationships with our customers and internally at EVRY. Digital solutions that give customers a competitive advantage are, as a rule, the result of interdisciplinary processes and fruitful collaboration between a variety of different solutions teams. When we combine expertise from our vertical focus areas with future -oriented technologies, we develop new solutions that add value. Our work on automated
solutions for processing building approval applications with the municipalities of Kongsberg and Bodø is a good example of this.

"The measures we are implementing to increase customer centricity and improve collaboration across our organisation are strong drivers for the development of the company’s corporate culture. Diversity with regard to expertise, gender and age are significant factors in this."

Björn Ivroth

CEO

Our three focus areas are also a clear recognition of the fact that it is not technology that limits the opportunity space for our innovation and potential value creation. It is people, knowledge, and collaboration that are crucial for our success. At EVRY, we survey employee satisfaction and engagement every quarter. The results of these surveys are not only a continual reminder of the fundamental role played by our employees, but are also a concrete tool for EVRY’s managers in their quest for improvement. In the period since the first survey in the fourth quarter of 2015 through to the fourth quarter of 2017, the overall score has increased from 75.4 to 81.6, on a scale of 100.

The explanation for this progress lies in the simple fact that we have stuck to our business plan from 2015 and delivered on most of our targets. We have set a clear ambition for the company, and have built up expertise in areas that are important to achieving our vision of “creating digital advantage for tomorrow’s leaders”. We have invested in expertise and concepts such as the Innovation Lab, the Strategic Design Lab, and Cognitive Services. We have recruited several hundred digitally talented people, including through our very popular internship program. We have also worked hard on collaboration. Collaboration agreements with global partners and new ways of working with customers, including strategic design, are important elements of this.

Internally our target is to increase collaboration across business areas and geographies. We are working actively on being better at drawing on all the expertise we possess. In 2017 we implemented an organisational change designed to support collaboration, which was setting up the Digital Platform Services business area. This business area develops and delivers solutions
across our geographies and market units and brings together infrastructure services, cloud services and cognitive services.

"EVRY’s future growth depends on us creating an exciting and aspirational culture that attracts the best people, both in terms of expertise and the ability to work collaboratively."

One of the major contracts EVRY landed in 2017 was won because we thought outside our organisational boxes and reporting lines. We beat the global companies competing for the assignment by combining the expertise and delivery capabilities of EVRY Norway, EVRY Sweden, EVRY Strategic Design Lab, our partner Method and our
subsidiary BEKK Consulting.

The measures we are implementing
to increase customer centricity and improve collaboration across our organisation are strong drivers for the development of the company’s corporate culture. Diversity with regard to expertise, gender and age are significant factors in this. This in turn also influences how we see the task of managing the company and what it takes to give knowledgeable and ambitious employees an arena in which to grow and develop. Greater flexibility and a flatter hierarchy are something that both our younger and older employees would like to see. This naturally fits well with the desire for a greater level of interdisciplinary collaboration and our passion for providing customers with value-adding solutions.

In summary, we are sitting on resources that we need to be even better at developing and managing. EVRY’s future growth depends on us creating an exciting and aspirational culture that attracts the best people, both in terms of expertise and the ability to work collaboratively. This means that those of us who lead the company must also give our people even greater freedom and responsibility when taking decisions involving customers. A culture in which decisions are decentralised requires us to have a strong set of shared values and strong structural capital and governance mechanisms. These are areas that will be high on the agenda of all of EVRY’s managers in 2018. The technology is there, our partners are on board, we are able to recruit highly knowledgeable workers, and we have customers who expect more from us. In 2017 we intensified our work on creating a strong growth culture at EVRY. We are beginning to reap the benefits of this work, which will continue with even greater vigour in 2018.